The American republic relies upon a common, egalitarian citizenship, argues Anthony A. Peacock in Deconstructing the Republic: Voting Rights, the Supreme Court, and the Founders' Republicanism Reconsidered (AEI Press, March 2008). But this republican virtue has been under assault from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) and its judicial interpretation. Peacock writes that judges have used the VRA to impose "the politics of multiculturalism," institutionalizing race and identity over common American citizenship.

Peacock argues that multicultural politics strikes at the heart of our system of government. The Founders assumed that there is such a thing as the public good. They built a system to assure that all points of view would be considered but that none would predominate or have a claim on the final legislative output.

Multiculturalism, however, denies these truths. Descended from political science in the Progressive era, which taught that all politics is the use of power by factions to achieve purely private ends, multiculturalism argues that one's race or ethnic heritage inevitably shapes one's politics. It holds that racial and ethnic factions must be permanently represented in Congress so that all legislation undergoes their scrutiny.

Peacock shows how judges have used the VRA to implement multiculturalism, thereby causing racial and ethnic fragmentation in American society and contravening everything the Founders sought in the young republic.

The VRA, he concludes, "seeks to institutionalize legally those very political identities based on notions of racial and ethnic distinction that the Constitution's commercial republicanism was designed to transcend." Deconstructing the Republic combines intellectual history, legal interpretation, and political philosophy to lay out how today's law compromises the Founders' ideals and undermines our polity.

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